Hands on: Samsung Galaxy M Pro review

Does this magical QWERTY handset put us under a spell?

Samsung announced in August that it was changing its naming strategy, so that there were a number of new profiles for its collection of handsets.

While the popular S range of smartphones stands for Super Smart, the M range – of which the Samsung Galaxy M Pro is part – is all about the magic. Well, the Magical to be more precise.

This essentially means that the handsets aren't packing enough power to be considered high-end but creep outside of the feature phone arena, offering enough for those who want a phone for everyday use.

The Galaxy M Pro, shown off at IFA 2011, offers just that, with the Pro part of the name simply meaning it has been given a QWERTY keyboard.

In the hand, the Galaxy M Pro feels like a decent device. It has been given a 2.7-inch screen which is a touch too small, though.

The Samsung Galaxy M Pro also packs Android 2.3, has a 5MP camera on the rear with LED Flash and can record video at WVGA at 30fps. This is coupled with a 1GHz processor and 1GB memory, which you can expand to 32GB through the microSD card slot.

While it is touchscreen device, our not-so-podgy fingers just felt that little bit too big for playing around with the OS, selecting widgets, apps and the like.

At least it is bright and Samsung has done the best it can with the screen layout it has.

Situated underneath the screen are real home, back, search and menu buttons. It would have been nice to have seen these as touch buttons, but they are responsive enough nonetheless. In the middle of this physical button hoard is an optical trackpad.

The rest of the fascia is made up of an impressive QWERTY keyboard. This may not be the most feature-focused phone in the world, but it does have a great physical keyboard.

This is definitely the star of the show, with Samsung making as much room as possible for the keys. They have been nicely colour coded too, with the numbers jumping out at you in dark yellow, as well as the ALT keys.

The look of the Samsung Galaxy M Pro is one of sleekness. A brushed metal chassis rounds off what is a rather eye opening device.

As with pretty much all of its Android phones, Samsung has overlaid TouchWiz, which we have grown to like – even if it does look a little cartoon-like.

In our first impressions with the Samsung Galaxy M Pro, the marriage of touchscreen and QWERTY keyboard may not be perfect – you will be using the real keys more – it is a decent stab at the BlackBerry market and one which may well entice those who want to try Android, but don't want to rid themselves of real keys.

The Samsung Galaxy M Pro UK release date and pricing are still to be announced.